I don't know whether my love for her began that night, but what I am certain of is that when a little before seven o'clock next morning we took a train, clammy with dampness and cold, I could no longer face the prospect of life without her, and that this woman sitting opposite me, pale and blurred in the cruel light of the compartment, near the window on which the raindrops showed lighter than the night - that this stranger, with a hat rendered ridiculous by yesterday's rain, was closer to me than any human being had ever been before. It would be difficult to be emptier than we were then, both of us, and we must have seemed like phantoms to people who saw us. When the night porter, the same one who had given us our key, came to wake us, a light still shone under the door, for our bedlight had not been turned off since I had gropingly switched it On. Martine was in her bath. I opened the door, wearing only my trousers, with my chest bare and hair tousled, to ask: 'Could you get us some coffee?' The porter too looked like a phantom.
